Locating Transcultural Memory
Organizer: Marije Hristova (CCHS-CSIC/Maastricht University)
Invited Speaker:
Max Silverman (University of Leeds)
Panelists:
Amanda Wicks (PhD candidate at the Department of English, Louisiana State University)
Maria Elisabeth Hüren (PhD candidate at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Marije Hristova (PhD candidate in History and Spanish Literature, Spanish National Research Council / Maastricht University)
Panel description:
Transcultural or transnational processes have been mainly conceived within geographical terms under the influence of postcolonial theorists (e.g. Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ or Marie Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zones’). In discussions around the topic of memory, the transcultural has been identified as the global movement and circulation of specific memories and narrative frameworks over time (Erll 2011; Rigney 2012). Within the diachronical perspective of Memory Studies, literary scholars like Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman have proposed that transcultural memory should be understood as the binding together or collision between different spatiotemporal frames. At the same time, Susannah Radstone calls attention to the deep connections between transcultural memory and specific spatial and temporal markers by suggesting that, ‘For even when (and if) memory travels, it is ever instantiated locally, in a specific place and at a particular time’ (Radstone 2011: 117). She suggests that we should study the (discursive) spaces in which transcultural memories are actualized. In this panel, we seek to discuss questions related to the representation and imagination of transcultural memories in spatial terms. To what extent can we understand transcultural memory in spatial terms? How can we locate transcultural memory locally and globally? What are the ethical implications of dislocating memories of violent pasts from specific places? The panel aims to explore the workings of transcultural memory through a wide range of mediums including literature, architecture, landscape, museums, film, journalism, etcetera.
Abstracts:
Palimpsestic Memory: Space and Authenticity Organizer: Marije Hristova (CCHS-CSIC/Maastricht University)
Invited Speaker:
Max Silverman (University of Leeds)
Panelists:
Amanda Wicks (PhD candidate at the Department of English, Louisiana State University)
Maria Elisabeth Hüren (PhD candidate at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Marije Hristova (PhD candidate in History and Spanish Literature, Spanish National Research Council / Maastricht University)
Panel description:
Transcultural or transnational processes have been mainly conceived within geographical terms under the influence of postcolonial theorists (e.g. Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ or Marie Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zones’). In discussions around the topic of memory, the transcultural has been identified as the global movement and circulation of specific memories and narrative frameworks over time (Erll 2011; Rigney 2012). Within the diachronical perspective of Memory Studies, literary scholars like Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman have proposed that transcultural memory should be understood as the binding together or collision between different spatiotemporal frames. At the same time, Susannah Radstone calls attention to the deep connections between transcultural memory and specific spatial and temporal markers by suggesting that, ‘For even when (and if) memory travels, it is ever instantiated locally, in a specific place and at a particular time’ (Radstone 2011: 117). She suggests that we should study the (discursive) spaces in which transcultural memories are actualized. In this panel, we seek to discuss questions related to the representation and imagination of transcultural memories in spatial terms. To what extent can we understand transcultural memory in spatial terms? How can we locate transcultural memory locally and globally? What are the ethical implications of dislocating memories of violent pasts from specific places? The panel aims to explore the workings of transcultural memory through a wide range of mediums including literature, architecture, landscape, museums, film, journalism, etcetera.
Abstracts:
Max Silverman, m.silverman@leeds.ac.uk
Following Freud’s use of the children’s ‘magic writing pad’ (‘Wunderblock’) to describe the work of memory, and Derrida’s reinterpretation of Freud’s model in his essay ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, I will first outline how memory as a palimpsest of superimposed traces is a spatial metaphor for memory. However, my main focus will be on the consequences of conceptualising memory in this way for our notions of truth, authenticity and ethics. If palimpsestic memory suggests that memory is not simply attached to a sovereign subject (as a psychological view of memory would have us believe) but dispersed across multiple, interconnecting sites, to what extent does this understanding challenge our notions of authentic, imagined and empathetic memory? And, if this model suggests that no single subject is the complete owner of memory, who or what constitutes the ethical site of memory? I will look at two sequences in Jean-Luc Godard’s 8-part video Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) to consider these questions in more detail. Godard’s method of associating and overlaying diverse images to produce a sort of Benjaminian dialectical image reshapes our notions of authenticity and ethics and shocks us into a new (post-humanist?) understanding of these terms.
The Imagined After: Relocating Collective Memory and Space in the Post-Apocalypse Novel
Amanda Wicks, awicks4@tigers.lsu.edu
Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the growth of external memory, i.e. locations and objects that situate and store memory, has altered the very nature of collective memory by replacing the social frameworks that structure and transmit the past. Consequently, people do not – or are not capable of – remembering the past to the extent they once did. The anxiety surrounding this heightened degree of forgetting arises most predominantly in the contemporary post-apocalypse novel. By imagining a futuristic space cut off from the past and devoid of geographical signification, post-apocalypse novels explore the associative relationship between space and memory. In doing so, they a) highlight the ways in which memory has undergone notable transformations as a result of changes to temporality and space, and b) posit an engaging relationship with memory once more based on social relations. In the wake of apocalyptic destruction, people become the spaces they once inhabited, creating communal memory through a collective site of social relations and interaction. As a result, memory takes on an increasingly social and animated quality in the absence of traditional spatial relations. These narratives, therefore, propose the possibility of a real and engaging relationship with memory in the absence of traditional spatial relations, one that (re)locates memory in Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of les cadres sociaux or social frameworks. My argument hinges around considering transnational post-apocalypse novels alongside critical work from Eviatar Zerubavel, Jan Assman, Susannah Radstone, Doreen Massey, and Michel de Certeau to better comprehend the relationship between space and collective memory. Instead of focusing exclusively on one text, I will incorporate a wide array of recent post-apocalypse novels and films in order to fully examine how this genre exemplifies the ultimate collective memory narrative in the twenty-first century.
Contextual Configurations of Civil-War Story Worlds
Maria Elisabeth Hüren, hueren@em.uni-frankfurt.de
This paper ‘thinks memory through space’ in two different, though interrelated, respects: one is concerned with the configuration of story worlds (fictional spaces) in and through literary texts, and the other with the distances that the media vehicles of these story worlds travel in real-world constellations (non-diegetic spaces). The recent ‘transcultural turn’ in memory studies has directed attention to a significant consequence of one of the field’s most basic observations: if all remembrance has an inherently social component, memory can be shared in principle; from which it follows that it can travel from one context to another. Empirically, this mobility can at least be confirmed for memory’s material dimension, and one example would be novels that narrative civil war experiences with an eye to ‘distant’ readerships. The thematic media genre is particularly insightful because the experience of civil wars is at once a uniquely local and a highly global one: by definition, this type of conflict does not exceed certain territorial boundaries; but at the same time, civil wars represent by far the most common type of war on a global scale. On the one hand, one might therefore expect that the story worlds of civil war narratives should rely on the ubiquitous availability of situationally relevant (cognitive) schemata on the part even of ‘distant’ readerships. On the other hand, the story worlds of civil war novels that are devised to travel to distant contexts may undermine any attempts to read the particular experience as consistent with such schemata.
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Amanda Wicks, awicks4@tigers.lsu.edu
Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the growth of external memory, i.e. locations and objects that situate and store memory, has altered the very nature of collective memory by replacing the social frameworks that structure and transmit the past. Consequently, people do not – or are not capable of – remembering the past to the extent they once did. The anxiety surrounding this heightened degree of forgetting arises most predominantly in the contemporary post-apocalypse novel. By imagining a futuristic space cut off from the past and devoid of geographical signification, post-apocalypse novels explore the associative relationship between space and memory. In doing so, they a) highlight the ways in which memory has undergone notable transformations as a result of changes to temporality and space, and b) posit an engaging relationship with memory once more based on social relations. In the wake of apocalyptic destruction, people become the spaces they once inhabited, creating communal memory through a collective site of social relations and interaction. As a result, memory takes on an increasingly social and animated quality in the absence of traditional spatial relations. These narratives, therefore, propose the possibility of a real and engaging relationship with memory in the absence of traditional spatial relations, one that (re)locates memory in Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of les cadres sociaux or social frameworks. My argument hinges around considering transnational post-apocalypse novels alongside critical work from Eviatar Zerubavel, Jan Assman, Susannah Radstone, Doreen Massey, and Michel de Certeau to better comprehend the relationship between space and collective memory. Instead of focusing exclusively on one text, I will incorporate a wide array of recent post-apocalypse novels and films in order to fully examine how this genre exemplifies the ultimate collective memory narrative in the twenty-first century.
Contextual Configurations of Civil-War Story Worlds
Maria Elisabeth Hüren, hueren@em.uni-frankfurt.de
This paper ‘thinks memory through space’ in two different, though interrelated, respects: one is concerned with the configuration of story worlds (fictional spaces) in and through literary texts, and the other with the distances that the media vehicles of these story worlds travel in real-world constellations (non-diegetic spaces). The recent ‘transcultural turn’ in memory studies has directed attention to a significant consequence of one of the field’s most basic observations: if all remembrance has an inherently social component, memory can be shared in principle; from which it follows that it can travel from one context to another. Empirically, this mobility can at least be confirmed for memory’s material dimension, and one example would be novels that narrative civil war experiences with an eye to ‘distant’ readerships. The thematic media genre is particularly insightful because the experience of civil wars is at once a uniquely local and a highly global one: by definition, this type of conflict does not exceed certain territorial boundaries; but at the same time, civil wars represent by far the most common type of war on a global scale. On the one hand, one might therefore expect that the story worlds of civil war narratives should rely on the ubiquitous availability of situationally relevant (cognitive) schemata on the part even of ‘distant’ readerships. On the other hand, the story worlds of civil war novels that are devised to travel to distant contexts may undermine any attempts to read the particular experience as consistent with such schemata.
The Body as a Space for Transnational MemoryMarije Hristova, marije.hristova@gmail.com
Since the turn of the twentieth century, Spain is going through a revival of the memories of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). After twenty-five years of relative silence, in 2000 the excavation of the anonymous grave of thirteen civilians killed in Priaranza del Bierzo in 1936, the first in what was going to be a whole cycle of exhumations, brought about an expansive interest in rewriting the history of the civil war from the victims’ perspective. These renewed articulations of Spanish civil war memories occur clearly within a transnational context. This transnational discursive space refers both to the transnational context of the historical event itself and to current transnational frameworks of memory, human rights and transitional justice.
In my paper, I propose to understand the body as a space for transnational memory. In Spain, the exhumed body has been inscribed in the transnational ‘vocabulary’ of the desaparecidos, while positing the victim within a transnational juridical, sociopolitical and theoretical debate about their significance in the present. Moreover, images of the tortured and mistreated body, with their capacity to evoke empathy, are used worldwide to inscribe current and past war crimes and human rights abuses in the register of transcultural memories of war. On the other hand, in Spanish literature, the ‘exiled body’ plays a crucial role in imagining and staging transnational memories. While the human body can be specifically located in time and space, the expelled body is simultaneously dislocated, as it exists between times (the exhumed body) and between spaces (the exiled body). Based on the representation of transnational memory of the Spanish civil war in contemporary Spanish literature as well as in journalistic representations, I will argue that, ultimately, transnational memory is to be located in the individual body and its capacity of redefining of space-time from the margins of the nation state.